Reflections of a traveling veterinarian
After a busy day at the faculty, I could have chosen a worse places to wind down, than the historic setting of A Brasileira do Chiado, one of Lisbon’s oldest coffee houses. Adraino Telles do Valle, a Portuguese merchant, who had married into a Brazilian coffee planter dynasty at the end of the 19th …
Continue reading “For a Bica with Fernando Pessoa at A Brasileira do Chiado”
It had been a short night. Despite my late arrival the previous day, I was awake well before sun rise the next morning, due to the constant noise of 7000 cars passing every hour 50 meters above the window of my room. In addition to this, there was a regular interlude caused by one of …
The door to the small balcony was left open and the light of the full moon came flooding into the room. A few fair weather clouds featured on the otherwise blue sky, the shadows of the bannister and the chair produced pitch-black lines on the floor, so that the whole scenery would have given a …
Returning from the truly remarkable setting of the small church of Agios Ioannis, which is precariously placed on top of a large rock at the weatherbeaten Northern shore of the Sporadic Island of Skopelos, I was sitting over a beautiful traditional Greek dish of octopus with herbs in olive oil and vinegar, when my …
Track shoes ready for another early morning run… And this time for a change one that will include a case of potential espionage and a visit of the American Embassy…. I am in Athens, in the middle of September. It’s by far not the first time I am here and I just love this city: …
It was the beginning of the summer, I was back in Switzerland and this time I was in love… It was a clear case of “Love at first sight”, if this term can be applied to a veterinary clinic or to a place of work in general. By now, I have had a number of …
There was no point to scream, as there was no escaping from it anyway… With some surprise I realised, how many nerve endings could be found on the surface of a human body, while several layers of my skin were removed by a bearded stranger I had never seen before. I just tried to dig …
I was in a bad way….for a whole day and for a couple of nights I had been struggling with abdominal pain and none of the painkillers I had thrown at it, had made much of a difference. Declaring defeat, I had managed to get a last minute flight with a Ukrainian carrier out of …
Driving along the Georgian Military Highway, leaving behind me the world heritage site of the castle of Ananuri, and heading North towards the town of Stepantsminda, I had to cross the over 2000m high Jvari Pass, where the green meadows of an Alpine plateau offers an ideal pasture for large herds of sheep. Crossing the …
Not for the first time, I had to throw common sense over board and break all the rules. I was standing at an altitude of 3200m above sea level at the bottom of the Gergeti glacier in the Georgian part of the Caucasus, not far from the border to Russia, about to do something really …
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